Code Rush (1999) - The Death of Netscape and the Birth of Mozilla

From March of 1998 to April of 1999 an independent documentary film crew followed a team of software engineers at Netscape Communications as they lived through a watershed moment in the brief history of their company, and the Internet.

The documentary follows the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last-minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31, 1998, and the impact on the engineers' lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.

A little less than three years later the "dot com bubble" would pop, and the entire landscape on the internet would change forever. There are many hints of that impending doom in this video, and the makers didn't even know they'd included them.

After Andy Baio uploaded the documentary to his personal website for the release of Mozilla Firefox 3 in 2009, director David Winton requested it be taken down, pending his decision about future distribution under a free content license. It has since been released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 US license.